Ever wondered about expressions for daydreaming?
Daydreaming seems to be one of those universal experiences we have.
No matter where you live, we all do it from time to time.
Daydreaming is defined as “the stream of consciousness that detaches from current external tasks when attention drifts to a more personal and internal direction“.
While there are many forms of daydreaming, they all seem to share the idea of dissociation from whatever it is you are supposed to focus on, like class or work.
So maybe it is not so strange that around the world, people have come up with creative idioms to express the sentiment.
On our untranslatable Facebook page, we asked people how they say “daydreaming” in their native language, and from those suggestions, we have created this post.
While many languages seemed to have variations on the same themes, many languages have managed to come up with really unique ways to express the useless places our mind can go during a daydream.
It seems the Spanish language in particular has a wide range of expressions to state someone is daydreaming.
So, without any further ado, here are 8 expressions for daydreaming around the world.
8 Expressions for Daydreaming Around the World
Blue Almonds | Polish
Pregnant birds | Spanish
Sleep with eyes open | German
Variations on this idiom seem to exist across different languages. In a way, even the word “daydreaming” could be interpreted as dreaming while awake.
Roosters glasses | Spanish
Heavenly pretzels | Russian
Head in the clouds | French
The expression of being with your head in the clouds also seems to occur quite frequently across different languages.
Calf’s death | Portuguese
Immortality of the crab | Spanish
If you are interested in finding more expressions across different languages, make sure to check out untranslatable.
Untranslatable is a multilingual urban dictionary and a sister project of the Foreign Langauge Collective. It contains slang and expressions from all over the world, including different ways to say the same phrase (e.g. daydreaming) across various languages.
You can also add your own entries to the dictionary.